This commencement address was delivered on May 14, 2017, to the graduating seniors of Hampden-Sydney College, an all-men’s school in southern Virginia.

Members of the class of 2017: congratulations.

Very soon, you will hold in your hands the diploma of a great and storied college. Very soon, you’ll be gone from this gorgeous campus; this nurturing, stimulating, protective environment — a place that, in a manner of speaking, has been your safe space for these past few years.

I’ve been thinking about safe spaces a lot lately. For those of you with the good fortune never to have heard the term, a “safe space” is not, as you may suppose, a concrete-reinforced room where you can ride out a tornado. It isn’t a bulletproof car, either.

Instead, a “safe space” denotes a place, usually on campus, where like-minded people — often sharing the same race, gender, sexual orientation or political outlook — can spend time together without having to encounter the expression of any ideas or opinions that they do not endorse.

Here’s an example. In the fall of 2014 a student at Brown University got wind that her school was going to host a debate between two women, one a feminist and the other a libertarian, on the subject of campus sexual assault.

The student feared that exposure to such a debate could be “damaging” to people in the audience, some of whom might find their experiences of sexual assault “invalidated” by what the debaters had to say.

So the student organized a “safe space.” As described by the essayist Judith Shulevitz in The New York Times, the space was a room “equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.”

Now that sounds harmless enough. And if such a space offered comfort to the people who used it, so much the better.

But the story of safe spaces doesn’t end there, unfortunately. As Shulevitz noted in her essay, “once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer.”

That’s an important insight. It shows how easily an impulse to shield and protect the vulnerable quickly becomes a desire — and then a demand — to impose a particular concept of “safety” on others, whether they want it or not.

After all, if a college or university should accept the principle of a “safe space” in a single designated room, why should that same principle not extend to the classroom, the lecture hall, dormitories, college newspapers, chat rooms, social media and so on?

If we want to accommodate the sensitivities of our fellow students, shouldn’t that accommodation extend not only to what we say around them, but also to what we say anywhere — or what we allow to be said anywhere?

And if it is not O.K. to say certain things, anywhere, should we even think them? Wouldn’t we be better off if the ideas that can hurt people’s feelings or trigger their anxieties never even popped into our heads in the first place?

I’m sorry to say that the process I’m describing — Orwellian though it seems to me, in that it turns supposed victims into moral bullies — is increasingly becoming a dominating fact of life on colleges and universities across America.

In the name of being “safe,” it is becoming increasingly difficult for campus administrators to guarantee the physical safety of controversial visiting speakers.

In the name of being “safe,” the job security of professors and administrators has been put at increasing risk — lest they espouse, teach or merely fail to denounce a point of view that contradicts the political certitudes of the moment.

In the name of being “safe,” students with traditional religious values or conservative political views now feel decidedly unsafe about expressing their views on campus.

And in the name of being safe, we are gravely jeopardizing the central task of any serious liberal education, which is not — or not merely — the transmission of knowledge.

It is, rather, the cultivation of a certain kind of spirit: a passion for inquiry; an insistence on asking hard questions and challenging received wisdom; a reveling in argument; a productive tension between self-confidence and self-doubt; a robust faith in the ultimate attainability of truth; and a humble acceptance that our understanding of the truth will almost always be something less than complete.

This is what education is, or ought to be, about. This is how we educate young men and women toward the moral and political responsibilities of democratic self-rule. This is how we lay the conditions for scientific and social progress. This is how we lay sturdy foundations for a truly civil society. Thomas Jefferson said it best in his first Inaugural Address: “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

Let me repeat that, so that you may commit the words to memory: “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” When you can’t speak freely, sooner or later it becomes difficult to think clearly. God did not give you a mouth in order to keep it shut. And the Constitution does not include a Bill of Rights so that we may refrain from exercising our rights.

This should be a standard for every free society — and for every great college and university.

From everything I have read about Hampden-Sydney, this is the education you have received here. I hope you use it well. But I need to level with you: You’ll be facing an uphill battle.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Across the country, hundreds of thousands of your peers are also celebrating their commencements, receiving their diplomas, starting out in the world. But not all of their educations have been liberal in the truest sense of the word.

Instead of being educated to a cultured skepticism, too many have been educated to a fervent certitude. Instead of embracing, or at least respecting, heterodox or unsettling ideas, they prefer to retreat into settled convictions. Instead of wanting to engage controversial discussions, they’d just as soon shut them down.

And instead of wanting to emerge at last from the cocoons of their “safe spaces,” they want to extend the domain of those spaces into the next stages of their lives.

Now, don’t get me wrong: The “they” in those sentences consists, for the most part, of nice, well-intentioned, intelligent, hard-working and often high-achieving people.

They just happen to know that truth and virtue are on their side. They are convinced that any difference of opinion on matters they hold dear isn’t simply an error of reasoning but an affront to human decency. They believe they are entitled to denounce the people with whom they disagree as knavish ignoramuses. And they believe that it is imperative to keep a very safe distance between themselves and the ideas that so disturb them.

Today, we live in a world that makes it easy to continue inhabiting these safe spaces, above all when it comes to politics, public policy and ideology.

On social media, you follow, share, “like” and retweet the people you agree with — while you ignore, unfriend, remove or block those you don’t.

If you’re a conservative news junkie, Fox News is your safe space, even if you’d probably never call it that. You can watch it for days — indeed, weeks, months and years — on end without ever encountering a persuasively contrary opinion, at least one that isn’t instantly derided as unworthy of serious consideration. If you’re a liberal, it’s the same story on MSNBC.

When you open the op-ed pages of a newspaper, you’ll turn first to the columnist with whom you already know you’re likely to agree, so that you can see your already-correct opinions repeated and ratified once more. As for the writers with whom you disagree — whether it’s Krugman or Stephens, Kristof or Krauthammer — you’ve already concluded that they’re idiots or liars, so you’ll either skip over them or read them with smirking disdain.

And so it goes. We all believe that the system of checks and balances is a good idea for a well-functioning and prudent government. But where are the checks and balances in our own thinking — the check that whispers, “You could be wrong”; the balance that suggests, “There’s another way of thinking about it”?

This is what I fear we are at risk of losing in America today. Too many of our schools are producing students who have never learned properly to engage, understand or accept an alternative point of view. Too many of our citizens want to hear only from the people whose views they already share, and who will never change their minds about a thing. And too many of our media outlets see no problem in catering exclusively to these increasingly narrow and illiberal tastes.

We worry a lot these days about political polarization, the unpleasant choices such polarization leaves us with at the ballot box, its effects on what used to be our common values, our shared sense of nationhood. What we fail to recognize is that this polarization is a result of us getting exactly what we want — only to rue the consequences.

A month ago, I chose to do my small part in trying to swim against this particular current. After 16 productive and happy years as a conservative writer with the staunchly conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, I decided to switch teams to the mostly liberal editorial page of The New York Times.

In case you’re wondering, my opinions are just as conservative, reactionary and antediluvian as they’ve always been. My salary is pretty much the same. And, no, I wasn’t pushed out of my last job.

But I did have a gnawing sense that it was time to stop talking to my own side, preaching to my own choir. I wanted to write for an audience that might not be wholly receptive — and might even be openly hostile — to what I have to say.

In short, I thought it was time to leave my own safe space: to take the gamble that I might be able to sway readers not always inclined to agree with me, and to accept the possibility that they, in turn, might sway me.

Has it been fun? Yes. Has it been rough? A bit. Has it been worth it? Ask me again in a few years. But I’m optimistic.

So here’s my advice to you: Get out of your own safe spaces. Define what your intellectual comfort zone is — and leave it. Enhance your tolerance for discordant voices. Narrow your criteria for what’s beyond the pale. Read the authors or watch the talking heads with whom you disagree. Treat those disagreements as a whetting stone to sharpen your own arguments. Resist the temptation to call people names.

By all means master the art of being pugnacious in argument — but as a pugnacious dialogian, not a petulant didact.

Go beyond that. Befriend your intellectual adversaries. Assume that they’re smart, that their motives are honorable and that they are your fellow travelers in a quest to better understand a common set of challenges. Master the civilized art of agreeable disagreement. Try to remember that words are not weapons, and that politics is not warfare, and debate is not a death sport. Learn that — in politics no less than in marriage — it’s a bad idea to go to bed angry with one another. Have an argument, then have a drink, together.

Members of the class of 2017: Do not close your ears to opposing points of view. Otherwise you cannot learn. Do not foreclose the possibility that you might change your mind. Otherwise you cannot grow. Do not lose sight of the fact that you are not in possession of the whole and only truth. Otherwise you will fail to notice your mistakes, and so suffer their consequences.

Above all, do not forget that the world would be a duller and darker place if everyone thought as you did, and if all our thoughts were safe ones, and if there were nothing to bestir our minds, and inflame our senses, and rouse our consciences, and churn the warm but too-placid waters in which we swim at our own peril.

Safe spaces, physical and intellectual, are for children. You are grown-ups now. If your diplomas mean anything, it’s that it is time you leave those spaces behind forever.